A Recontextualization Of Bakhtin's Translinguistics And Its Application To Print News Analysis

Translinguistics is a different mode of language-study advanced by the former Soviet scholar M. M. Bakhtin in response to the so-called objective abstract structural linguistics established by Saussure, who severed the abstract langue from the seemingly chaotic and complicated parole and selected the former as the only legitimate object for linguistic study in order to set up a scientific and rational mode of linguistics. On the contrary, Bakhtin insists that it is the actual speech rather than the abstract Saussurean langue that is the reality of human language, and that the actual speech is not purely individual, arbitrary and free of social constraints as it was thought to be. Therefore, the real language-study should include the observation of the actual speech (or its written form, namely, text). In order to distinguish his mode of language-study from that of Saussure, Bakhtin names his way of looking at language problems translinguistics. Unlike the so-called pure linguistics that takes the sentence as its analytical unit, Bakhtin's translinguistics regards utterance as its unit for observing the actual speech, the inherent property of which is thought to be dialogicity. Such Bakhtinian translinguistic ideas, however, are dispersed sporadically in his works written over different periods of time, so it is quite necessary to piece them together and make them recontextualized in the current context. Another problem with Bakhtin's translinguistics, as far as its applicability to concrete textual analysis is concerned, lies in its limitation of preferring a macro-philosophical theorization on language to micro-systematic observations of language use. It seems that Bakhtin confines his dialogic textual analysis to literary genres (especially the novel discourse of Dostoevsky's) and excludes the so-called public discourse (including hard news text) from his poetic-linguistic observation. He even holds that the public discourse differs a lot from dialogic novel discourse in that the former attaches too much importance to "objectivity and authenticity" and is rhetorical and teleological in nature, hence lacking the "verbal art" pursued by the novel discourse. Therefore, the public discourse is thought to be monologic. This, however, seems to be in conflict with his later understanding that dialogicity and monologicity are actually symbiotic and dialogicity usually penetrates into monologicity; the difference between them is relative and just a matter of degree. But this important idea on the relationship between textual dialogicity and monologicity is only recorded in the form of note-making and had not been fruitfully elaborated by Bakhtin himself before his death.Based on such understandings of Bakhtin's translinguistics mentioned above, this thesis tries to first give a relatively systematic account of Bakhtin's translinguistic theory and then to recontextualize these translinguistic ideas in the setting of contemporary linguistic theories (especially text-linguistics), hoping to establish a more linguistically-oriented translinguistic framework for textual analysis. During this recontextualization of Bakhtin's translinguistics, taking hard news text and novel text as the two ends of a continuum formed by texts of various genres according to the criterion of factuality or fictionality, the thesis attempts to conduct a dialogic reading of print hard news text of English, aiming for a textual-dialogicity-centered translinguistic theory with a wider coverage both theoretically and practically.Among the contemporary linguistic theories, this thesis has found that the Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is able to bridge the gap between Bakhtin's translinguistics and pure-linguistic findings, hence the selection of SFL as the basis for the recontextualization and development of Bakhtin's translinguistics. Among the major translinguistic concepts, three key notions, namely, voice, utterance, and dialogic relationship, which are found to be crucial for a more workable dialogic analytic model for hard news text, are under special focus. A linguistically-oriented dialogic textual analysis actually presupposes a double-directional analytical activity: a top-down theory-driven observation of the text and a bottom-up data-based interpretation. Thus, before analyzing concrete texts, it is quite necessary for the thesis to give an adequate description of those special linguistic resources which are able to mark out the alien voices in a text. With a developed analytical framework and an adequate observation of relevant linguistic resources, this thesis finally conducted a dialogic reading of two complete front-page hard news texts from The Sunday Telegraph, a broadsheet quality newspaper published in Britain. The feasibility of the recontextualized dialogic model has thus been tested and at the same time, the fictional feature of the so-called professional principles of objectivity and neutrality in the process of hard news production has also been revealed.The findings of the dialogic reading of hard news text, therefore, imply that as a reading strategy, dialogic analysis of text will play a crucial role in cultivating the so-called critical literacy for citizens in the modern society, in which various forms of capital and power are so penetrating that they have dominated and controlled nearly each sphere of the society through legitimatizing and habitualizing the ideologies they manufacture and promote.